His first novel, Involution Ocean, published in 1977,
features the world Nullaqua where all the atmosphere is contained in a single,
miles-deep crater; the story concerns a ship sailing
on the ocean of dust at the
bottom, which hunts creatures called dustwhales that live beneath
the surface. It is partially a science-fictional pastiche of Moby-Dick by Herman
Melville.

From the late 1970s onwards, Sterling wrote a series of stories
set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe:
the solar system is colonised, with two major
warring factions. The Mechanists use a great deal of computer-based
mechanical technologies; the Shapers do genetic
engineering on a massive scale. The situation is complicated by
the eventual contact with aliencivilizations; humanity eventually splits
into many subspecies, with the implication that many of these
effectively vanish from the galaxy, reminiscent of The Singularity in the works
of Vernor Vinge.
The Shaper/Mechanist stories can be found in the collection
Crystal Express and the collection Schismatrix
Plus, which contains the original novel Schismatrix
and all of the stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe. Alastair
Reynolds identified Schismatrix and the other
Shaper/Mechanist stories as one of the greatest influences on his
own work.[1]

Bruce Sterling at the Open Cultures conference (June 5, 2003)

In the 1980s, Sterling edited the science fiction critical fanzineCheap Truth, under the alias of Vincent
Omniaveritas. He wrote a column called Catscan, for the
now-defunct science fiction critical magazine, SF Eye.

The Viridian
Design Movement - his attempt to create a "green" design
movement focused on high-tech, stylish, and ecologically sound
design.[5] The
Viridian Design home page, including Sterling's Viridian
Manifesto and all of his Viridian Notes, is managed
by Jon Lebkowsky
at http://www.viridiandesign.org. The Viridian
Movement helped to spawn the popular "bright green" environmental
weblog Worldchanging. WorldChanging contributors
include many of the original members of the Viridian "curia".

Embrace the Decay - a web-only art piece commissioned by the LA
Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003.[6]
Incorporating contributions solicited through The Viridian Design
'movement', Embrace the Decay was the most visited piece/page at LA
MOCA's Digital Gallery, and included contributions from Jared
Tarbell of levitated.net and
co-author of several books on advanced Flash programming, and Monty
Zukowski, creator of the winning 'decay algorithm' sponsored by
Bruce.

Neologisms

Sterling has a habit of coining neologisms to describe
things which he believes will be common in the future, especially
items which already exist in limited numbers.

In the December 2005 issue of Wired magazine, Sterling coined
the term buckyjunk. Buckyjunk refers to future,
difficult-to-recycle consumer waste made of carbon nanotubes (aka
buckytubes, based on buckyballs or buckminsterfullerene).

In July 1989, in SF Eye #5, he was the first to use
the word "slipstream" to refer to a type of
speculative fiction between traditional science fiction and fantasy
and mainstream literature.

In December 1999 he coined the term "Wexelblat disaster", for a
disaster caused when a natural disaster triggers a secondary, and
more damaging, failure of human technology.[7]

In August 2004 he suggested a type of technological device (he
called it "spime") that, through pervasive RFID and GPS tracking, can track its
history of use and interact with the world.[8]

In the speech where he offered "spime", he noted that the term
"blobject", with which he
is sometimes credited, was passed on to him by industrial designer
Karim Rashid. The
term may originally have been coined by Steven Skov Holt.[9]

From Wikiquote

Sourced

Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the
abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the
sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it
up?!?

in the Long Now talk "The Singularity: Your Future
as a Black Hole" (2004)

As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to
engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to
one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming
acute.The most effective political actors on the planet now are
people who want to blow themselves up.
These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the
morning and face another unpredictable day.

in the Long Now talk "The Singularity: Your Future
as a Black Hole" (2004)

Tomorrow composts today.

in Shaping Things (2005)

"Mashups [...] "nobody's going to listen to mashup's -- in
another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They're like the
monster mash.They have no musical staying power. You know -- you're
pursuing a phantom there. It's bad music. I mean it's not bad --
it's you know a pastiche, it's like magazine collage; you know
which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that that's like
tremendous creative work -- no! It's a tremendous creative power --
and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously
good. You know and we need a little bit of aesetic honesty in
confronting things like this. Just because it's new and people with
laptops can do it and get away with it and find an audience for it
does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon."